The Sleeping Dragon Awakes
by slytherinphoenix116
Summary: While the Trio hunts Horcruxes, childhoods will fade into memory and new Heroes will rise within Hogwarts' walls. Lions and Eagles, Snake and Badgers must each embrace their own brand of courage, and rise to the challenge of driving evil from their midst.
1. Fire In His Eyes

It was 2nd September, with the dull heat of summer's dying strains still permeating the castle, the first time Neville Longbottom felt true fire. He hadn't woken up that morning intending to stir the pot, intending to fall into an exhausted sleep that night as a hero. But, then again, true heroes never really do.

The seventh years filed into Muggle Studies on their first day, and the same room they'd inhabited for years somehow felt too small, crammed with ghosts – of dignity shattered, of security swept aside, of chairs emptied by friends scattered too soon by untrustworthy winds. Neville sat between Pavarti and Lavender, painfully aware of their uncharacteristic silences, each caught up in their own world of swirling uncertainties.  
>"Despicable creatures, Muggles," the Death Eater hag – Neville wouldn't dignify her with the title Professor, even in his mind - trumpeted, her attempts at gravitas almost comical. "No sense of pride, no understanding of life's mysteries – mysteries we've mastered, by the way." Neville noticed she was reading from a paper, and almost laughed, but thought better of it. " I am here to purge you, of the defiance and deviations that a lack of careful breeding have allowed to enter our sacred blood. It is a travesty, a travesty, I tell you, how these Muggles seduce innocent witches and wizards and rob them of their untainted legacy. Children that could have been pure magic are now defiled. You, Finnegan, what does your useless father do, after all? I guess some magic families raise their daughters to sleep with anything that hobbles in off the street and be lucky for the chance at it, eh? And you, Thomas, what was it like for your father, I wonder, pureblood that he was? Your ignorant whelp of a mother probably tossed him out of the house when she realized he was one of us, fearful of his power, and left him to die alone, isn't that what happened?"<p>

Both Dean and Seamus tensed, hands on wands, but Neville – half unconscious of what he was doing until the deed was done – chose words as his weapon. "Stop," he commanded, his voice shaking but fury-strong. "Dean's father is dead, you obviously know that, and torturing him like this is just low. I thought," he finished - ignoring the inner voice championing self-preservation and throwing his words to the ground like the gauntlet they were - " that you were supposed to be a teacher, and not just a glorified bully."

Silence fell over the classroom, and Neville suddenly became the epicenter of a web of stares. He could hear his heart racing wildly; its rhythmic thumps seemed the only noise for a split second. And then, the crystalline edge of the moment tipped, and the world exploded.

Neville was still sitting, in the chair he'd occupied through years of peace and normalcy, when the curse hit. Spasms began coursing through his limbs before the last syllable had even dropped fully from her lips. The chair, the desk, the stones of the floor had all seemed so commonplace mere seconds ago, but they were now abstract shapes and surreal edges, as he tumbled to the floor, propelled by muscles brought by agony into revolt.

A thousand needles seemed to score his flesh simultaneously, a poisonous never-ceasing burn infiltrating the sanctuary of his skin and dancing between tendons, sizzling on the edges of bone, leaving no place unscathed by the sensation of utter annihilation. Neville was hardly aware of so mundane and tangible a fact as his own sobbing, so forcibly had he been divorced from the world of tears, until his eyes became so blurred that he blinked, unconsciously trying to clear his vision. The fading world of reality vanished, replaced with the terrain of his mind that he'd begun to discover during his summertime Occlumency lessons: a garden fenced by heavy-thorned roses, rife with bluebell and thyme and sprawling proud grapevines, a garden now being devastated indiscriminately by the whirlwind of the pain.

His eyes flitted open momentarily, running from the terror of seeing vanguards of his sanity ripped to shreds, and glimpses the lazily cruel smile distorting Alecto's face. He saw no blood in that moment to dignify his agony, no visible manifestation that would have least have given the him reassurance of physical cause. That was almost the worst part of the curse, Neville thought in the half-delirium it induced, that it's all a trick of the mind. It doesn't physically mar you; it leaves your skin deceptively free of scars – those it leaves for the clouded windows your eyes become. The curse turns your own body against you, making your synapses and nerve endings into vicious turncoats intent on reporting agony where there was none, near-death bodily devastation when in fact, only the mind was near its end.

Because Neville understood, now, what his parents had suffered, understood in a way he never could have before. He heard the siren song, telling him that this was all in his head, that none of it was tied to reality, that if he just retreated into a deep enough sanctum, pain would cease to matter, and he would be in bliss. Rationality cried out against it, but the seductive voice grew louder, and he began to follow, because in that moment, he would have given anything, anything, just for a second's piece from the anguish tearing him apart. He followed its notes down a path, saw the tunnel, had one foot into its silky citadel of savior-darkness – and then it stopped.

Neville's world goes white as his eyes fly automatically open, his body still twitching on the stone cobbles, the beginnings of bruises blossoming from the collisions that had felt like mere whispers in the symphony his pain had been only moments ago . Neville trembled as he lay there, letting the sobs he cannot and would not control convulse his shoulders as they burn through him with cleansing heat.

"Tut, tut, boy. You'd think by seventh year, you'd remember we don't allow sleeping during class, don't you recall? Or maybe you think you're back in primary school, is that it? He probably thinks he's five years old again, dotty as his Daddy, I'm sure, little brat. Got what was coming to him all along. If you can hear me, boy," Alecto yells, a little louder, as if she thinks him deaf, "then bow. Get up now, and show me a nice little bow, just like old Granny taught you, eh?" The class looks on, still recovering from the shock, still digesting the rabbit hole they've all been thrown into, this new paradigm that will make them all old before their time, before the year is even out.

Neville looks up, and faces her, phoenix fire dancing behind his eyes. If she had seen - if she hadn't been too busy gloating - she would have cowered, even with the weight of a Dark Lord supporting her. Because out from behind the bloodshot blue there was a man who'd just been thrown off the precipice at the farthest end of his every childhood nightmare, and found himself on the other side, in a land free of the fears that had defined him from the moment he had first understood his parents' story.

He got up from his side to his knees, but refused to stay there more than a second before rising shakily to his full height.

"Good!" the hag cooed. "Now bow."

A room full of eyes stared, and he felt the weight of all these lives, each bound up and isolated in their unique lonelinesses, shackled by their individual terrors. They'd probably call what he did next recklessness, later, those Slytherins and dispassionate cynics that played the long game. But he knew it wasn't the meaningless show they'd proclaim it to be, knew it deeply as he fingered the ridges of the gum wrapper that had given him fire and the coin that had given him strength. He knew it, because if Neville Longbottom knew one thing, he knew that symbols mattered.

So, just as his spine began to bend, and Alecto began to look insufferably smug, Neville turned, still shaking from remembered pain and from the reflexive echoes of the fear Alecto had so successfully purged, and instead bowed to the three empty seats on the Gryffindor side of the room, inclined his head and his heart towards the only hope he could believe in.

As Alecto raises her wand again and Neville sees sparks of dissension and mutiny begin to catch and erupt in first one pair of eyes, and then two, he shoves out the words through gritted teeth, bracing for the pain. "I will never bow to you."


	2. A Bird's Eye View

From the castle grounds, Ravenclaw Tower was unassuming enough. At a distance, cobblestones melted together in the eyes into a solid block of grey spiraling skyward, silhouetted by the setting sun. Even if you squinted and strained, you couldn't see within the fortress of the mind, couldn't see the quills and absently abandoned socks and illegible scrolls scattered just within the portrait hall. You couldn't see the rebellion in the minds of Hogwarts' most revered strategists. And you certainly couldn't see the girl who perched astride the highest turret of the tower, letting the wind waltz her flyaway white-blonde hair through the sky.

As she settled her bare toes into a more comfortable position on the several-inch ledge that supported her, Luna smiled indulgently, feeling as though she were about to take flight. In fact, it occurred to her, as she gazed westward at the pastel twilight, that she might even be mistaken for some species of bird, from the right angle, up here, where no respectable, sane human would ever be. Her color pallete was off as far as indigenous, Luna admitted to herself; but if someone had really abysmal depth perception...

A pop of static from the two-way receiver lashed to her belt interrupted Luna's thoughts, and Terry Boot's voice crackled out of the battered black box. "All right up there, Lovegood?" Terry asked. "Still not sure this was the best idea, to be entirely honest. We've got all the typical belaying precautions up, but all the same, with the Carrows prowling around, who knows what could happen."

"I'm doing marvelously, Terry," Luna called back serenely, whispering the activation spell and aiming her wand at the box as she spoke. "It's actually quite picturesque up here, and not frightening in the least. Besides, you know, there's a unique breed of Margipox that only comes becomes visible in the first moments of dawn"

There was a brief pause, and she could picture Terry raising his eyebrows skyward into that half-exasperated half-fond expression he'd taken to wearing around her.

"Right. Well. I've got all the hardware raring to go on my end, so it's all up to you to make sure the transmission comes through all right, and do some last-minute fiddling if I tell you it isn't. Ideally, the radio receiver should give off a few sparks."

"What color are the sparks?" Luna asked, tapping her toe along the ornately carved ledge in a nonsense rhythm.  
>"Don't rightly remember. All sorts of colors, I think. Red. I think red was involved, and possibly yellow. I got a veritable firework show when I turned on this set earlier, and the local unit seems to be doing all right for itself. Probably just residuals from the connecting spells we rigged it up with."<p>

The work Terry referred to was his pride and joy, and the better part of why Luna was a thousand feet above the lake.

At the start of term, when the school was just beginning to accustom itself to what the DA termed the Dark Days and Potterwatch had first appeared on the radio waves, all student Wirelesses had been confiscated, on pain of Cruciatus. Luna knew the tactic. Isolate us, lock us up behind stone and try to turn us against each other. It was brilliant, even in its cruelty.

It went without saying that being found with a Quibbler was an offense it would take you a few days to recover from, if caught, so copies of those quickly became sparse as well. Day after day passed, and Luna became more and more restless, needing to know, needing to be a part of the fight she'd found herself a part of two years ago.

One night, Luna wandered down towards the common room after her dorm-mates were fast asleep, meaning to gaze awhile at her mother's favorite star for inspiration. The Ravenclaw tower was unquestionably the most splendidly beautiful bit of architecture Luna had ever seen, and even after six years of calling it home, it still gave her a chill of appreciation whenever it opened in front of her again. Though an observer would see only stone, from within, the walls seemed to be composed entirely of glass, molded into a flawless dome.

From the left and right of the portrait hole, stairs were delicately carved from a substance slightly more opaque from the walls, spiraling around the tower to reach the fourteen doors – seven pairs set directly opposite one another, each set a level above the next. As students advanced in years and in wisdom, they climbed higher and higher to find their home, until, at last, in their seventh year, they occupied an unbroken circle directly below the pinnacle of the tower, the apex of which was left open, to allow sunlight and starlight alike access into the common room proper. As a sixth year, Luna's home was the righthand semicircle six levels above the common room floor, its five beds each positioned with an unimpeded view of the night, the mountains, the grounds.

Closing the translucent door behind her, Luna began down the deserted stairs, gently pushing away one of the magically suspended study hammocks that floated lazily around the space as it nudged her arm, thinking she was out for a midnight study session. Luna reached the ground floor moments later, and headed for the slight indentation in the floor where she always sat on nights like this, after she deduced it provided the most direct view upwards at the moonlit sky. She was just about to turn her focus upwards, and search out the constellation she knew so well, when a movement in her peripheral vision stole her attention.

Emerging from what seemed to be an unassuming cobblestone, Terry Boot appeared to be levitating out of the floor itself, his back still turned to Luna. He slowly and painstakingly slid the cobblestone back into place before turning towards the lefthand flight of stairs – and meeting Luna's eyes.

"So, have you found it, then?" Luna asked, twirling a strand of hair between her pinky fingers.

"Fou ... I..." he stuttered, turning a pleasing shade of pink. "Don't know what you're on about."

"I know what it is, silly. I've read all the legends dozens of times. You've found the Labyrinth, haven't you?"

He had the decency to give up the pretense of ignorance and this point, and settled for gaping. "You actually know what it is?"

"Well, I know what the stories say. Is it really a age-old Ravenclaw secret, a labyrinth ruled by the portrait of Socrates' himself and the namesake of the Socratic Method itself?"

"Well," Terry coughed, clearly seeing the game was up. "You really have read those stories," he finished, lamely.

"Of course I have. Be a bit daft to call myself a Ravenclaw if I didn't truly know what its history was, wouldn't it?"  
>Terry looked like he might have other thoughts on the matter, but wisely chose to kept htem to himself.<p>

"So, I imagine you must be working on something important, or you'd never have been able to find your way in, right?" Luna prompted, levering herself out of her stone perch. "No one's gotten in in ages, though probably because no one bothered to look much."

"Well," Terry began, on firmer footing now that he could talk about his projects. "I've been working on quite a few, actually. Mostly grafting together the concepts of Muggle technology onto a magical apparatus, so that they can operate in magic-saturated areas, like Hogwarts. Mostly just bringing Wizarding England up to speed with a few things they've missed in the past few decades. Soc's been helping me, in his own way, of course, and letting me set up a real Lab right in the center of his Lab, if you will, and answering all his questions gave me some bloody brilliant new ways to fit everything together, if I do say so myself. It's been a good way to keep my thoughts busy over the last few weeks, when – well, you know."

Something in Luna's mind clicked while Terry was speaking. "No chance you've got the workings of a radio down there, do you?"

Terry gave a halfhearted wince. "In a manner of speaking, yes. Theoretically, I've got a setup together, with all the necessary enchantments in lieu of Muggle electronics."

"But?" Luna prompted, rolling on the balls of her feet.

"But I haven't been able to test it, see, because you need to set up a manual receiver, and I haven't found a way to set it up on top of the tower, where it really should be."

"Why don't you just levitate me?"  
>"Why-yo-WHAT?" Terry babbled, struck dumb by the suggestion.<p>

"See, without a radio, I can't listen to Potterwatch, and with a war on, it's only intelligent to expose oneself to - " Luna paused, allowing herself a grin, "a wide range of programming, let's say." Terry Boot was sympathetic to the cause of the DA, even if he was more of a researcher than a fighter himself.

"So, let me get this straight. You want me to levitate you up to the top of the tower, hundreds of feet above the ground, so you can listen to a few people rattling on about Potter for a few minutes?"

"Yes, exactly, that's precisely it!"

Two days later, after much concerted effort to slice a tiny hole in the wards, already unstable from Dumbldore's demise, Terry and Luna had propped open a window and Luna had slid through, clinging to the outer edge until Terry began to levitate her upwards, shakily but steadily, until she reached the upmost point of the tower itself. There were arrested momentum enchantment barriors on every side of her, Luna knew, and a Weasley Wizarding Wheezes Invisible Trampoline (Hours of Hallway Fun!) stretched out between the tower and the Owlery, to guard against worst case scenarios, but despite all the protections, and Luna drifted skyward, she felt a thrill of excitement. Finally, she could do something meaningful.

And so, she waited, letting her thoughts wander and fly on the breeze, for the outside world to crackle through the antenna.

Luna knew they all called her crazy, but she thought them just as daft, in her less charitable moments, for being so unobservant as to believe the world made sense. In a fair, sensible world, actions follow logic like ducklings in a row, and catastrophes befall the villains, with happy endings and suitably tragic deaths the only due for the heroes. In a fair world, mothers don't fall dead at their cauldrons helping to brew an experimental curse antidote, only to be forgotten by a public unnerved by an incident beyond even the most skilled Forensi-Wizard's capacity to explain. In a sensible, rational world, you don't see thestrals at eleven, and you certainly don't learn to love them before they explain to you in hushed tones that you shouldn't.

She was used to the raised eyebrows and the furtive stares, but they'd never much bothered her, not when there was so much else in the world to concern oneself with; watching for the wingbeats of Nargles, peering at the ground for footsteps of the elusive Snorkack, squinting to see the dust left in the wake of a Blibbering Humdinger flock. Luna couldn't imagine journeying through the world believing in and searching for only the parts of it you knew were there, instead of the multitude of possibility peeping out from just beyond the obvious. It would make your days so impossibly dull, living that way, tied to the mundane and the knowable.

Sometimes, Luna wished she could just stay here, head in the clouds, perched far above the loss and frustration and chaos of a society ruptured by the madman who had once been Tom. Up here, where the flighty breeze was queen, a world split at the seams resolved itself into clean, interrupted landscape. Up here, her optimism untethered by pain , the masked, the braze and the broken alike shrunk to the size of pawns, and Luna could see the entire chessboard, receding into the past and sprawling into the inevitable future, the culmination of the patterns extending rut-like through time. She could see the black king falling on his own sword, as all megalomaniacs eventually must. She could see the valiant pawns collapse into tearful memory. She could see lives crushed beneath the serpent's fangs, just as they had been trampled beneath jackboots and skewered by uncaring crowns. Luna had read about the Warlock's Hairy Heart, but all the same, she wished so fervently that her heart could take wing and fly away while her body climbed back down the stairs, back to the lions and the snakes and the war.

But even as she considered it, Luna knew that there was no refuge for her now. Two years ago, perhaps she could have stepped aside. Perhaps she could have gazed into the distance as the blood was spilt and the battle cries screamed, existing on another plane entirely. But every time Luna looked at a valley now, she wondered if Harry might be hiding in the safety, wondered if Hermione and Ron might be foraging along its byways. She remembered Harry's smile and the way he'd counted her as one of them, remembered Hermione's unflappable strength and Ron's easy humor. Luna had stood with Ginny in front of a classfull of second-years as the Carrow's curses fell, smiling even when the other girl eyes had begun to leak unbidden tears, because no one who burned so bright and had shown such kindness could be allowed to stand alone.

It was odd, for Luna, finally knowing she had friends. Normally, she felt life was much improved by its uncertainty, by the wondrous quantum uncertainty of a world that may morph into unrecognizability at any moment. But this feeling, of standing beside them and knowing that others would rise to stand beside her in a heartbeat, was different, because, for once, it was a phenomenon more glorious for its certainty than its mystery.

"Fifteen seconds now!" yelled Terry's head, protruding for a few moments from the window below before ducking inside to man the Lab.

"I'll be watching," she breathed, knowing full well he was too rapt in his work to hear her. Five, three, one, Luna whispered, and then the receiver came alive with light, illuminating the blackness with a rainbow of sparks for a few moments before beginning to putter and pulse with a steady golden glow.

"All systems go!" Terry yelped from below, triumph evident in every syllable. "Come on down, before you miss much more; Rapier's on already!"

"Coming!" she called.

Luna let fingers slip away from stone, let her cape billow around her as she fell, arms outstretched. She laughed as the wind and the night embraced her, drawing her earthward. Luna knew the price she would pay for that certainty and warmth, and she accepted it. She was ready to be grounded by reality, ready to stand her ground and fight, and perhaps even be laid beneath the ground in the heat of war. But, for just one moment, she thought to herself, as the safety trampoline bore up on her, for just one moment, she would elude the ground, and allow herself to fly.


End file.
